The next frontier for wireless LANs is 802.11ac, a standard that increases throughput beyond one gigabit per second. This concise guide provides in-depth information to help you plan for 802.11ac, with technical details on design, network operations, deployment, and monitoring.

Author Matthew Gast—an industry expert who led the development of 802.11-2012 and security task groups at the Wi-Fi Alliance—explains how 802.11ac will not only increase the speed of your network, but its capacity as well. Whether you need to serve more clients with your current level of throughput, or serve your existing client load with higher throughput, 802.11ac is the solution. This book gets you started.

Understand how the 802.11ac protocol works to improve the speed and capacity of a wireless LAN

Matthew S. Gast

Matthew Gast is the director of product management at Aerohive Networks, responsible for the software that powers Aerohive's networking devices. He has been active within the Wi-Fi community, serving as the chair of both security task groups at the Wi-Fi Alliance, where he leads efforts to extend the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) certification to incorporate newly developed security technologies and drive adoption of the strongest forms of security by network administrators. He also led the Wi-Fi Alliance's Wireless Network Management marketing task group's investigation of certification requirements for new power-saving technologies. Matthew is also the past chair of the task group that produced the 802.11-2012 revision.

This is an excellent book about a relatively complex subject. Certainly one for the hard disk and eventually, the library of all those designing wireless networks. Easy to read even for mid-level network admins. Gast took ages to release the survival guide about 802.11n, jumping on the early release bandwagon with the 802.11ac was absolutely the right thing to do.While an early release, this is certainly not a draft, but a handbook about a subject that is still evolving. Answers to the curious on what is the ac? Why should I care? Is it going to work? How?I read the early revision version 1